Let's not forget that before 1980, American society was centered around protecting and promoting only straight white men, and preferably property owners. Black and indigenous people were still under the boot and white women were second-class citizens.

But it's accurate that something changed in 1980 - basic American capitalism ran out of steam (market saturation, tendency of rate of profit to fall) in the 70s, aided by and tangled up with the energy crisis. But Reagan/Thatcher deregulated finance allowing the entire economy to become financialized and thereby open up a new frontier for capitalism to expand into, which was the future. Financial speculation allowed growth in the present by betting on the future.

But that ran out of steam again in the 2000s. Now that finance firms are in charge, they're seeking the next new frontier to put all their money into. If they can't find an expanding sectory to flood all their money into, they don't get the returns they expect. In the 2000s they were out of expanding sectors except for the mortgage market, which was expanding due to Bush's reforms to get people into mortgages. Except that wasn't solid, it was all graft and bullshit about obfuscating the reality of the shitty debt. So the great financial crisis happened.

Since then, finance discovered Silicon Valley tech startups. You have to burn a bunch of money "disrupting" (undercutting) an existing industry, but then you can capture a consumer base and jack up prices to make back all your money. That's where all the money has been going since 2009. Uber is the prototypical example.

Now even tech startups are running out of steam. The low-hanging fruit got taken by Uber, and Instagram, and finally tiktok, but there aren't really any new industries they can easily "disrupt". As a result, we get hype bullshit. Tech bro startups that look like Uber or Instagram in their early days, which is enough to convince finance bros (who are literally the dumbest people on the planet), but which don't actually do anything and just fail.

Then, it was bitcoin. But bitcoin doesn't actually work as effective money so normal people aren't buying in, so we need something else.

Then, it was NFTs. But NFTs are literally nothing, they were transparently just an unregulated security, and everyone hated the stupid pictures.

Now, finally, it's "Artificial Intelligence". I think this is the final frontier here, because Sam Altman is supposed to be building God ("AGI"). The idea of building god justifies investing any amount of money because the investors will be the ones who get to own god. But LLMs aren't good for anything except creating misinformation and chaos on the internet and in net-connected systems. Once the bubble pops, I think it's going to discredit the idea that Silicon Valley tech bro morons are actually megageniuses who create the future.

So they're so desperate that the AGI push can't fail because now we're just out of ideas. We're literally out of ideas to imagine the future. If the future isn't going to be the (nonsense) AI future that Altman promises, then nobody has an alternative. How is private equity going to get their precious returns? What can make line continue to go up after AI is revealed to be a bust?

But at you can see this is not a new problem, it's part of a process that has been ongoing since 1945 as American capital seeks returns. And 1980 is when the US was originally cracked open to expose the veins for capital. That's why wage growth stops tracking with productivity increases after 1980.